Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Man makes circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.
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Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.
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He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.
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The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.
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Habit and imitation--there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.
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Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.
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Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.
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It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.
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Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.
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Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher, some spiritual hero.
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I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.
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For, strictly considered, what is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?
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Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.
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A noble book! all men's book!
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To each is given a certain inward talent, a certain outward environment or fortune; to each by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum capacity.
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Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.
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The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!
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Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.
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All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!
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The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to destroy any comfort.
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Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.
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We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer.
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A mind that has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried and conquered.
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O thou who art able to write a Book, which once in the two centuries or oftener there is a man gifted to do, envy not him whom they name City-builder, and inexpressibly pity him whom they name Conqueror or City-burner! Thou too art a Conqueror and Victor; but of the true sort, namely over the Devil: thou too hast built what will outlast all marble and metal, and be a wonder-bringing City of the Mind, a Temple and Seminary and Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.